cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/28095114
Vapor World: Over The Mind is a Soulslike Metroidvania with an evocative, painterly art style reminiscent of Lies of P and the narrative platformers of Playdead. According to Korean studio Alive Inc, the game had 100,000 wishlists just before its early access launch on August 19, mostly on the strength of a demo available since January 2025.
But what should have been a triumphant early access launch went pear shaped very quickly. At launch, few talked about the quite distinctive worldbuilding or the parry-heavy combat. Instead, all focus was trained entirely on something absent from the popular demo: very obvious AI use.
Vapor World: Over The Mind is a Soulslike Metroidvania
Daring today, aren’t we? Is it also a deck builder somehow? No wonder they had to slop the slop, creative juices run out on the fourth word of the title
Director Young Kim,
“That was a hasty judgment on my part. Unless AI takes one more leap and reaches a point where no one can tell the difference, what I believed was still closer to an ideal than a reality. I expected some of you would be disappointed by our use of AI. I did not expect it to become this big.”
“I’m sorry we got caught this time. We’ll try to dupe you again later.”
Has real “and I would have gotten away with it, if it weren’t for you meddling kids” energy.
If people can detect it as AI it shouldn’t have passed the quality check. People will happily buy games from the most awful and immoral companies if they like the game.
Those indies don’t get canceled for using AI - they get canceled for a lack of quality control.Good. Make another example of them. Slop will not be tolerated and will torpedo your ‘studio’ instantly.
I heard that Lies of P’s sequel itself has also shown some AI bullshit in some of the material they have released about the game.
That is very disappointing to hear.
Look this is simple: There is no legitimate need to use AI to do anything, let alone anything you take seriously and/or you’d want to charge money for.
So if you’re not just being a paid shill then why kill your reputation by attaching your name and company to ANY amount of sloppy shit?
Just don’t do it.
Apart from getting tasks done faster.
Ultimately the litmus being AI or not is stupid. The test is the same test weve always had. Is it good.
If its bad, rate it shit and move on.
You can make good shit with AI if you actually review what its done, understand it and tweak it. Its a force multiplier not a replacement for your own lack of skill.
There’s plenty of reasons to use ai. There’s just no reason at all to only use ai.
That’s the difference. And one that for some fucking reason all but like 2 studios seem to have fucking figured out.
Expedition 33 had ai tool usage. But that’s the entire fucking point. They used it as a tool. Still came out as one of the best fucking jrpgs in years.
Bitching about ai usage as if any amount ruins everything. Is like bitching that using a power tool ruins a whole fucking house and we should all keep using hand tools.
It makes zero fucking sense. Just stop fucking expecting the machine that is explicitly not perfect to be perfect. Treat it like a fucking tool. And actually do your god damn job instead of trying to replace people.
It’s a fucking power tool, not some machine spirit that can shit out a perfect product.
at the very least don’t use it for the the most visibly apparent components of a game. Having it stub out scaffolding for underlying systems in the code is one thing, using it for visual assets is just dumb
This just shifts the problem to a new location. Don’t use it for art, or scaffolding, or code, or concepts, or anything a person gets paid to do or a different person expects a human touch from.
AI is a fine search engine, it doesn’t need to eat the world.
‘Dammit genie you get back in that bottle right now!’
It is NOT fine as a “search engine”. If you even read AI summaries you’re dumber this year than you were last year.
To be fair, ai summarys and using it as a search engine are two VERY fucking different tasks. Like night and fucking day.
It also doesn’t help the ai models in charge of the summaries on most search engines are some of the stupidest lowest quality pieces of shit we have.
A model told to actually do a search properly is functionally no different than if you or I did it. And will actually be able to do the job properly. They are very good at this sorta work load.
You ask it to go though a bunch of summaries then summarize those summaries and do use in like 1 seconds. You of course are getting fucking slop.
You aren’t giving it the time or information needed to do the fucking job right. They arnt magic machines they can’t do shit instantly.
I’m sorry, but I’m certain that the average AI summary beats/matches what the average person gets from a normal search. You’re acting like people before AI didn’t just believe whatever the first or second link told them, for most cases.
If you’ve ever even read the summary of a study, you’re in the top 10% of “people that research online”.
So basically people burn more energy while doing the same shit as before. Yeah you’re really selling it. Generally we should be fixing stupidly instead of letting billionaire parasites leach off of it.
It sucks as a search engine. When I’m searching for something, I want factual, correct results, not a hallucinated answer which is backed up by none of its sources.
When I click through search results, I’m reading, evaluating the sources, and synthesizing the information into something which I am reasonably satisfied is true enough. I don’t feel comfortable handing that cognitive task off to a machine. The machine’s job is to help me find the sources, not tell me what the truth is.
Having a machine that tells you what is true is the most dystopian shit ever, and it would’ve sounded completely insane only 5 years ago.
It takes work to turn them into useful search engines. Set up librewolf. Drop in at least a search and a fetch agent. Wrap it in a some prompts to make sure you get actual links.
On my extremely non-scientific scale I’d rate that setup somewhere between barebones Kagi and pre-enshitified Google in terms of results.
I’m hopeful that an actual agent framework will do a better job that’s significantly more work. If you just log onto a SaaS LLM you’ll get very unpredictable search results.
You seem to be describing an answer engine, which isn’t what I said. It’s really no worse than the last five or so years of Google if you just want links to a topic that you can go and read yourself. It’s fine at that, it’s not good.
Yeah, I was talking about the Gemini blurb at the top of Google search results.
To be fair, Gemini is one of the lowest quality pieces of s*** we have. Google also basically gives it no time to do the job.
They’re not magic machines. They take actual f****** time to do something. So of course it’s going to s*** out worthless garbage if you don’t give it enough information to make something good and no time to do anything.
Trying to say that AI is a bad search engine based off Gemini. Is like saying that an artist who is never picked up a pen and paper is worse than someone who’s been doing it for 40 years. Therefore all artists are bad.
It’s f****** nonsensical and ignores the entire actual context of what’s happening.
And then after the backlash, the project director came out thinking the only issue was that the AI didn’t look good enough. Yeah bro that was the issue glad you’re in charge here to figure it all out.
“If someone asked me what I think about using AI, the honest answer is that I would have to think about it for a long time,” the director wrote. “The reason I chose AI was that I believed it could reach a level of expression our existing resources could not, and that it would let us focus more on the game itself, outside of story and cinematics.”
He continued: “That was a hasty judgment on my part. Unless AI takes one more leap and reaches a point where no one can tell the difference, what I believed was still closer to an ideal than a reality. I expected some of you would be disappointed by our use of AI. I did not expect it to become this big.”
…
“The truth is, we spent a long time trying to tell this game’s story with cutscenes made entirely by our own hands,” the statement goes on. “The results were devastating every time. We came to believe we could not properly deliver this game’s complex, difficult narrative that way, and that is why we turned to AI. But if that choice hurt your experience, the fault is not in the tool. It is in our own shortcomings.”
I don’t get it how do artists get captured by the Shortcut Machine like this? Genuinely what worm is entering these people’s brains where suddenly they don’t know or care what art is and just want to ask grok to “make it look cool with dinosaurs and lightning and an erupting volcano.” Brother if you can’t do what you planned to, change the fucking plans. Those constraints are how we get cool and interesting new works and themed and art directions. People love the ps1-era graphics look and it’s not because Square Enix asked chatgpt to generate a Tomb Raider cutscene in the style of Monet or whatever.
To be fair, the issue is basically that it didn’t look good enough. Just look at the backlash expedition 33. Games still beloved and came in as one of the best jrpgs ever made made that AI usage. The only problem was that people noticed the AI usage.
As long as it’s just a tool and it’s transparent like any other tool and people have no f****** issue with it.
That’s just literally a fact.
As long as it’s not being used to slop out s***** products then it doesn’t really matter. Getting matter over AI usage is like getting mad over people using Photoshop. It’s just a tool. It doesn’t matter what tool people use. As long as they’re actually putting effort into making sure the final product is good and not lying about it, then it’s fine.
To try to come up with an explanation that doesn’t pretend these peoples brain fell out of their heads:
Some people are crafters. For them the process and even the tools around that process are important, maybe even more important than the outcome. It makes sense that they would be wary of AI, to put it mildly.
Other people are builders. For them, all they want is to solve an issue, build a solution, create an art. The way they get there is an implementation detail they don’t care about. They don’t care whether it’s real oil, or digital oil, as long as the oil painting in there head becomes a real thing somehow. It’s understandable why they might at least try to use AI for art.
“It would be better if you couldn’t tell that you were being lied to, and I’m annoyed that we got caught.”
“We aren’t creative enough to tell this story ourselves.”
That dude’s dumb as rocks, glad they’re facing a consequence.
“We don’t want to pay someone who is better than we are because they want a lot of money.”
Yeah, pretty good reason, actually. It’s not like indie devs are generally known to be swimming in pools of money.
I don’t get it how do artists get captured by the Shortcut Machine like this?
True, maybe we need to police artists more to ensure moral purity and alignment with political correct ideology. Make them delete their “work” line by line, file by file /s
PS: Reminds me of this: https://lemmy.world/post/51139260 . The age of pluralism is definitely coming to a middle.
His response is shockingly tone deaf and approaching genuine hilarity.
AI boosters are controlling the narrative around AI, and what constitutes as extreme positions on it. They made the general population believe, refusing to use AI, refusing to engage with genAI output, especially if paired with mean online comments, is extremism. Meanwhile they claim the “golden middle road” is using it as a tool, such as an already established artist using it to brainstorm ideas, use it for reference material, or use their preexisting capabilities to fix up the AI generated output. Similarly, pro-AI extremism is being downplayed to “slop posting”, especially if it is paired with severe AI psychosis.
Reality:
- There are now some actual anti-AI extremists. The worst of them would not mind sacrificing a portion of the population to put the genie back into the bottle. Less severe people would just put the tech oligarchy and some AI devs in front of a Nuremberg-style trial, ban the use of LLMs altogether, force AI companies to delete any models that made without consent, try to come up with an international agreement on a global AI ban, etc.
- Pro-AI extremists are a lot worse in actuality, than just some third world guy posting AI slop as a side hustle or engagement bait, to get ad revenue money. The DOGE boys’ excuse for the USAID massacre and the deregulation is that any problem, including 600 000 (!) people dying from USAID funds getting pulled, is that AI deregulation will lead to artificial superintelligence, which will lead to a quadtillion human being living in the solar system in a few centuries. TESCREAL is a fucking cult, that would be too extreme for Shin Megami Tensei, let alone the real world.
- “Moderate usage” or “rational adaptation” is often a slippery slope. I’ve seen way too many devs trying to use it as a “tool”, only to implement things on AI hallucinated specs and similar shenanigans, with many falling down the rabbit hole of loop engineering and vibe coding, all while claiming the decreased code quality worth the “productivity gains”. Said “productivity gains” don’t last for too long though.
- The “I want more ethical AI” crowd are usually hypocrites IMHO. At best, they secretly run their own model. At worst, they’re the same as your average AI bro with mild AI psychosis, except usually more leftist and more secretive about their AI usage. I heard that some devs who previously had issues with attributing open source code are those most likely to be in this group, though I cannot confirm due to lack of a solid evidence.
- Your average “can you please not post AI slop?” people are the real centrists.
- You’re right if you refuse to use AI, you’re right to not want to engage with AI slop, even if your aunt disagrees.
You can just say that you believe that no one should use AI. You don’t got to write so much man.
You’re also falling victim to The logical extreme fallacy. You’re functionally stripping out every bit of nuance there is from this discussion. Enforcing people into one of two extremism camps.
There’s nothing in the world that is like that. That’s not how people work.
Can you really call a studio that relies on AI independent?
Yes. With AI-using indie devs it’s really just like with YouTube woodworkers who use a Festool Domino for their joinery. As long as they aren’t actually sponsored by Festool in any way, they can still be independent.
Stupid games, stupid prizes. I’m really glad the gaming community at large is presenting a resounding “fuck off” to sloperators and their plagiarism machines trying to steal the work of actual creatives. It’s disgusting, and should be met with sharp rebuke
There was enough slop out there in the gaming world before AI stole center stage. And yet there are so many games getting released every day that it’s genuinely difficult for new developers to get noticed. Tried+true studios are hitting diminishing returns. Gamers have a cornucopia of options old and new, and can afford to say no in this market much more easily than in most other markets.
And then there’s CoD, GTA, sports… and they get what’s left after Roblox takes most money from the industry.
Soulslop, if you will.
“The truth is, we spent a long time trying to tell this game’s story with cutscenes made entirely by our own hands,” the statement goes on. “The results were devastating every time. We came to believe we could not properly deliver this game’s complex, difficult narrative that way, and that is why we turned to AI. But if that choice hurt your experience, the fault is not in the tool. It is in our own shortcomings.”
Man, if this is true – that they agonized over the cutscenes but decided they couldn’t and that AI would be better* – then I feel legitimately bad for them.
I went in assuming it was strictly a lazy “ah, fuck it” kind of thing, but even though this still wouldn’t be acceptable, it seems like this team really is hard-working, cared about the final product, and actually did think AI could deliver a good experience. Deluded, but that seems like part of a larger culture of delusion in SK.*
* Notably, the article remarks on how sentiment around AI in South Korea is vastly more positive than e.g. the US.
How could AI possibly tell a complex story better than a human could? It sounds like bullshit.
look at AI dungeon, before it became whst it is noe
Interesting context, but that statement sounds so fucking stupid.
“Welp, we tried so hard, but just couldn’t portray our art in the best possible way. So naturally, we turned to the soulless machine that fails at generating anything resembling art even if you tell it to do a 1:1 copy of a real art piece.”
LLMs can make stuff resembling art. I’m not interested in it, though, because a human didn’t make it. What makes art art, what makes it interesting, is artists.
This is speciest. Art made by animals is just as good as art made by humans!
I was thinking the same but I have so many questions (that I don’t care enough to research).
How big is their team? Could they not find any competent artists? Could they not afford any competent artists? Could they not afford to upskill any of their current team, like getting them lessons in whatever was relevant?
It seems like they were just shallow and wanted a “classically” pretty product right now. And that doesn’t engender much sympathy.
How big is their team?
If a few paragraphs of reading into the article we’re supposed to be discussing is too much, I’m not sure why you’re here trying to discuss it.
I’m not here to “discuss” anything about the article. As I said, I don’t care enough about a game studio sinking their project with genAI to do research.
When I don’t care about the topic, I skim the comments to see if there is any hidden merit to reading. While doing so, the comment resonated my initial feeling of pity, and I shared my perspective on specifically the quote and comment I just read.
Satisfied? Have I engaged with content in a way you’ll allow now?
That’s basically a statement for the press to try to minimize damage. He even said they had the cut scenes done and later replaced them with AI. Bullshit.
Unless AI takes one more leap and reaches a point where no one can tell the difference, what I believed was still closer to an ideal than a reality.
They are mad they got caught and it’s the AIs fault for not being good enough to hide it.
it’s the AIs fault for not being good enough to hide it.
“if that choice hurt your experience, the fault is not in the tool. It is in our own shortcomings.”
The director literally outright says it’s their fault for using the tool.
And what do you mean “got caught”? It’s very obvious. They mistakenly thought most audiences would enjoy it, not that audiences wouldn’t notice. Which makes sense given the overwhelming difference in the perception of AI between SK and the West. He even outright says he expected people to notice: “I expected some of you would be disappointed by our use of AI. I did not expect it to become this big.”
The very first thing you need to become an artist is a sense of taste. Everything builds from that. If in his judgment he thought that art looked good enough then what does that say about him as an artist.
What game with slop have people ever enjoyed? They are not that stupid.
If using a “tool” is wrong, then the fault is the “tool”.
Please open this article, Ctrl+F down to “% who say the increased use of artificial intelligence in daily life makes them feel …”, and tell me which country is at the very bottom, with 16% “more concerned than excited”, 66% “equally concerned and excited”, and 22% “more excited than concerned”.
It’s like you’re refusing to understand the concept of a cultural barrier.
I guess that’s a problem for the Korean game industry then. If you want to sell to the international market, you’re going to need to do some research. Not doing so is wilful blindness. No one in gaming doesn’t know that globally players absolutely hate detectable AI anything. Just including AI in your process makes people uncomfortable. Expecting a major part of your game to be entirely generated content and that just being overlooked takes some pretty delusional confidence.
All that matters is rabid AI bad.
I’d rather see the “bad” things than Ai.
Honestly if the rest of the game is good, I would rather have some napkin sketches, or a computer based paint software.
Do you genuinely believe this is true for even just 10% of gamers? 10% of people? I’m not saying I disagree, I just don’t believe any relevant amount of people give a damn about the purity of art for most things.
Most art the average person interacts with is mainly utilitarian. Marketing and porn is probably like a good 80% by mass. As long as the art does it’s job, I just don’t believe most people give a fucking damn.
You’d honestly be hard for us to find even 1% of the population gives any real f*** about the source of art. They pretty much only ever care about the actual final result and maybe at most a name attached to it because it’s of value in some nebulous fashion. Not the reason why that value is there. Just that it has it.
Hell honestly, most art is utilitarian. You’re entirely right on that. It’s made to serve a purpose either for the artist themselves or for the person consuming it. Most communal forms of art are made as a way to do something more efficiently or as part of a ceremony to accomplish something.
Art for Art’s sake is kind of an extreme rarity.
No you wouldnt. 4 decades of whining and bitching by gamers have proved that. There is no winning with this lot.
I’m 100% with you. Bad art with genuine effort put into it has a charm of its own. I understand the team’s mistake, but it’s still a mistake.
I wonder, what would be examples of games with badly done art that is overlooked because the game itself is good.
And I think stuff like Minecraft doesn’t count, because with that style, the uglyness is a choice, not a result of not being able to make things look a certain way.
Five Nights at Freddy’s is popular if nothing else, but the art in the early games isn’t bad on purpose.
“Sentinels of the Multiverse” is a fairly popular board game (within those circles) and it looks pretty rough. Pokemon S/V got rightfully dunked on for looking like shit but it still made a bunch of money. “The Case of the Golden Idol” is highly regarded. Runescape.
No one really gave pokémon any s*** for the art. They gave s*** for the performance such as like the pop-in and reused assets.
But the actual art is fine. No one really had issue with that. It’s pokémon for heaven’s sakes. Not crisis.
That’s why people got mad. It’s basic 3D models in really simple backgrounds and it ran like s***. There’s no reason for something that looks like pokémon to run poorly.
I think pokemon was so heavily criticized partly because it’s developed by a veteran studio that really should be able to do better. And the way it looked bad wasn’t so much the art style, but how it was loaded into the game.
You had a lot of pop-ins, things not being animated in the distance, and every npc using the exact same animation at the exact same time, as well as some truly uninspired textures out in the wild.
Gamefreak is clearly capable of better when you look at Beast of Reincarnation or Little Town Hero, they just don’t seem to care about pokemon anymore.
Effort, talent, technology, taste, there’s lots of reasons for something to look bad.
Most obvious example I can think of is Cruelty Squad, the art style is intentionally eye-searing there though.
Still seems like a cop-out.
If they had intended to do it manually in the first place, I don’t see why they couldn’t just use AI to help generate a number of rough outlines to help conceptualize a solid template that satisfied their needs before investing their time into it.
AI could maybe help stress test the game before the final release. If AI were used like that, the game itself would likely not be considered slopified.
The dirty data centers, the RAM chip grab, the widening divide between the haves and the have nots being exacerbated by the billionaire AI ownership, these problems have to be addressed before I can even consider the other issues. AI as tech is usable, but as a socioeconomic phenomenon it is hugely problematic.
The anti ai crowed is so rabid even that would cause immense backlash.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the anti-AI crowd has every right to be as rabid as they wish. AI proliferation has been an immense boon to a few who work in some hardware and software fields, while causing an immeasurable amount of collateral damage elsewhere. The cost-to-benefit is extremely disproportionate depending on who you are, where you live, what you do, etc.
Regardless, this is a free market. If people don’t want to buy games with AI in them, it does not make them “rabid”.
If you choose to utilize AI to help you construct your product, expect people to have feelings about it and budget for it. That’s it. It’s a small ask against the millions of other people who have been forced to completely reassess how things are done in their respective fields in order to account for rapid AI disruption and interference.
Why not hire people or another firm to do the cutscenes then. You know, professionals who have learned and perfected their craft. Professionals you don’t have.
Backslash shouldn’t have been a surprise.
Money. Capitalists have it. Developers need it.
How do you not understand this. You and 14 other people.
“Oh just spend a million more on this and delay the release!”
It’s bullshit, they experienced zero agony, they skipped from trying it themselves straight to AI without bothering to just pay real artists because they’re cheap.
Man, if this is true – that they agonized over the cutscenes but decided they couldn’t and that AI would be better* – then I feel legitimately bad for them.
even then, you use the AI output as inspiration, not as the end product…
It’s almost as if neither “ai can do everything for me” nor the ai witch hunting are healthy approaches, but, as always, people keep polarizing themselves to hate on the opposite tribe.
I’m so fucking tired of this bullshit…
The logical fallacy of extremes will never not be one of the biggest issues with humanity
Yyyyyyyyup. Even attempts at honest discussion get polarized. “If you use AI(LLMs) you’re an unethical AI-Bro!”
Oh… I didn’t realize that my self-hosted open source small model trained on Wikipedia and Stack Exchange was unethical. Thank you for showing me the error of my ways.
Yes, you are acting unethical. Your self-hosted model is neither open nor was it trained with consent. Using them is just as unethical as using the models from OpenAI.
CC BY-SA gives freedom of use. Why do you think additional consent would be necessary? Or do you mean that because the restricting conditions are not met, additional consent would be necessary?
Given the form of transformation, Share-Alike is certainly difficult to meet, if not impossible. Is that what you referred to with “is not open”? Or do you mean something else?
A license may allow something but that doesn’t make it ethical to do. At the time these licenses where written the wholesale pillaging of the commons by AI companies wasn’t a thing. For that reason I don’t think it matters what license anything was published under. Unless you where given permission by the author its not OK to train your model on it.
I consider Open Weights models only open in name, the training data is almost never released. As such it is just an attempt at open washing. Its like releasing some executable files and calling that Open Binaries.
Are you aware of “Implied lack of privacy?” It means places where you cannot reasonably assume privacy, like a public beach or supermarket. Public forums and public wikis are about as implied lack of privacy as it gets. If you post a guide on stack exchange on how to solve a programming issue, you revoke your rights in how that information is used. This includes using it to create new software. If you decide you don’t like a program I created using your guides, well… That’s too bad for you.
And no, this is not victim blaming, because I’m not defending actual theft or telling people to protect themselves more. I’m stating you cannot steal something that has been freely offered to the entire world.
I don’t know why you are talking about privacy. Expectation of privacy is unrelated to copyright. Anyway the point I am making is that a license allowing something doesn’t make it moral. Sure, the law allows someone to train their slop generator on my code but I can still think they are an unethical piece of shit for doing so. The same goes for the people who then use such a model. Which is also why I don’t feel bad about techbros crying about how they are bullied online for using AI.
Some models do use open datasets and largely reproducible training, with the Nvidia Nemotron series being the highest profile example. You are right that many are opaque about training data, though, and this is not okay.
Using them is just as unethical as using the models from OpenAI.
And I vehemently disagree with this.
OpenAI is a different order of magnitude of moral depravity. Thats like saying using Lemmy is just as bad as using Facebook or Palantir.
Lol, tell me you don’t understand anything about the technology without telling me you don’t understand anything about the technology. Nobody here is defending scraping artists libraries or using copy written material. Go find a different strawman to cry at.
“You just don’t understand it” was also what the crypto people always told me when I called their obvious ponzi scheme a ponzi scheme.
Good for you. Keep wielding that shield of ignorance indescriminantly. Do you also think cryptography itself is harmful, or are you focusing on the specific use and harm caused? Guess what, the technology that made the crypto stupidity possible was used for far more than just gambling on imaginary coins. Once again, you’re conflating the worst implementation of a technology with its use as a general rule. Would you defend a small set of positive and ethical uses of LLMs? Or do you condemn the entire tech, on the assumption that it is inherently bad? Do you know precisely where and how the tech developed for crypto is helpful to you, and improves your privacy and safety?
You’re even being downvoted for an entirely sensible opinion. I feel like the type of people to downvote this opinion are the type who don’t comprehend that boardrooms were creating slop using real artists that they control through economic suppression. The bigger issue is that most consumers don’t have the media literacy to tell what is slop with a lot of money put into it verses the quality that independent artists are able to put out when they can’t afford a team of economic slaves to polish their work, and the lack of media literacy drowns them under the salience and market dominance of Disney and Warner types.
But if an indie dev uses a local AI to accomplish the same polish that is currently only available to big corpos, they could actually make their real artwork look more competitive with corpo slop,
But people don’t have the literacy on ‘why’ AI bad, the same way people don’t seem to have literacy around opportunistic oligarchs buying the whole political landscape giving you a choice between mask off corpo leaches promising things antithetical to their actions, and mask on corpo leaches pretending to combat it. The solution weirdly isn’t “burn the technology.” much like the phones in our pockets, there is zero reason for them to be useless bricks outside of the proprietary data collection and gambling pipeline that has been deemed the “only safe option” as if a Linux equivalent is more dangerous than the corpo data collection and limiting of our own autonomy over our own devices.
Similarly the cloud, which is literally just “let us organize all of your local data for you on our computers. Keeping your data with us is just easier or something.” rather than just enabling people in their own local networks.
So the landscape being built for us is the problem, but we can’t get there when most people can’t spend more time absorbing a topic before taking the strong socialized beliefs that are given high emotional salience, because they socially feel that it is bad, not because of the decades of encroaching systemic oppressing that we have to crawl out of.
It’s not the indie artist using a tool that’s the problem, and that tool is stealing nothing from anyone, rather than using systemic exploitation as righteous artistic accomplishment like pretty much anyone with actual money for “labour.”
The pendulum has only just started to swing. Homeostasis will take time.
Unfortunately it may be politicized beyond recovery, at least in the US with the trajectory of things.
Its going to be associated with the corporations doing awful things with it, and thats going to blot out the sun.
deleted by creator
I would much rather have content made with vision by a small AI augmented team than no content because of a lack of funding or ability. I’m great at programming, but I’m no fucking artist. AI makes it possible for people on either side to deliver a unified end-to-end vision. This hate of anything AI is misdirected. Hate the shitty companies, not the technology. Idiots sound like the anti-calculator folks.
The problem is that there is no way of knowing (at first sight) if there was an earnest attempt. AI has a certain look to it, and that look has been associated with slop and shortcuts because of unbridled use of an imperfect technology. It makes sense that it would illicit a sense of revulsion. Also, people who lack the skills or time necessary to create a certain type of art are more likely to lack the ability or patience to properly judge the quality of that art. “Good enough” is rarely good enough.
Man there’s no way to know that someone made an Earnest attempt with traditional art either they could have just been tracing, stealing or repackaging.
If you require proof of every little thing up front before you judge it, then you don’t get to enjoy anything.
At some point you have to trust people at their word or you just don’t get to have fun.
That’s just unfortunately how society the real world and reality works.
AI has a certain look to it
I think this is a dangerous misconception.
I could feed locally run Minimax H3 a set of reference art, like the painted stills from this game, and it would exactly match the style. I could use start/end frames, motion masks, pose control, character sheets, voice and music samples, reference videos; I can get it to do whatever I want with extreme precision, and as long as I checked the output it would be indistinguishable from CGI.
The point I’m making is that a lot of people percieve diffusion as mashing a Stable Diffusion keyword prompt into a text box, and getting a sloppy result. Maybe thats still how shit corporate services like ChatGPT work.
But a LOT has changed over two years.
Theres no way people can definitively detect generative output anymore. We can IF its done lazily, but its quite possibly indistinguishable now, too.
Even two years ago, I remember someone telling me they saw a YouTube video that said you could always tell an AI generated image because their noise map would be the same in R, G, and B. And I tried to explain to this person that that depends entirely on how the image was generated, on what platform, by what model and method, what post-processing was done, etc.
And I was told I was ignoring their evidence. 🙄
Also… you could just add grain via post processing?
Its actually a reasonable technique, as it softens diffusion blocking artifacts the same way it softens video codec blocking artifacts.
The YouTuber sorta kinda has a point, depending on the context. Spammers tend to use the absolute laziest lowest common denomenator, so its quite possible theyre largely using the same model, with the same artifacts, and not bothering to edit output. So maybe they did have a common noise pattern? Though the way thats presented still sounds fishy to me.
I think the idea was that within an image the noise in red would match the noise in green and the noise in blue, because whatever system they were looking at picked a single noise map per image? Something like that. And yeah, it was reasonable because it was absolutely true of the laziest stuff out there (which is most AI stuff, which is why we use the word “slop”). But my counter-argument wasn’t that the method couldn’t work, it was that it couldn’t always work. Because image generation is done in thousands of different ways and post-processing exists.
The thing that I wish was better understood is that “slop” = “low effort.” Artists can make some pretty amazing stuff when AI is merely a part of their toolset and they still put effort into their work. But that means that not all AI is slop, and thus if you really want to detect AI, you can’t rely on it always being slop.
You’re asking them to learn and understand rather than parrot… god speed.
But you see, it’s okay when they gatekeep because they’re defenders of truth and humanity! Gatekeeping is a good thing when used on people you don’t like! What’s that about equal accessibility and ableism? Shut up! AI bad!
Lesson learned
The hate on this game is where anti-AI becomes Butlerian Jihadism. I hate that AI is being shoehorned into where it shouldn’t be and shoved down our throats like bloatware to hurry up and justify the trillions of dollars mindlessly invested in it. But to deny indie and solo devs this tool is cruel.
Also, I find this mindless anti-AI hate ironic when there’s a big heading in the side panel here listing Approved Bots. Forums prior to Reddit didn’t allow bots. For a reason. Maybe look into that first?
Tell me you don’t know Dune without telling me:
The hate on this game is where anti-AI becomes Butlerian Jihadism
to deny indie and solo devs this tool
this mindless anti-AI hate
You haven’t the slightest clue what the BJ was about if you equate it with non-violent expression of opinions, denying indie devs a tool and call it mindless hate.
To catch you up, the premise as outlined by the Reverend Mother:
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
The people using thinking machines that were targeted by the Butlerians weren’t indie devs, nor solo devs, nor other “small people”. It also wasn’t a harmless creative tool.
They were technocrats using it to enslave people.
I think it’s quite understandable that people would resent enslavement. That’s not mindless hate, that’s a quite natural desire to be free. You wouldn’t call abolitionists “mindless whip-haters” either, would you?
And the result wasn’t a few people speaking out against these users of thinking machines, but a century of bloody revolt until they had destroyed not just the AI, but also all other machines with even simple logical components.
The vast difference in both scale and nature between this criticism of a particular kind of thinking machine we don’t like (GenAI) being used in making programs for a thinking machine we do like (computers) and a slave revolt turned all-out war of annihilation against calculators makes this comparison just plain bizarre.
Tell me you don’t know Dune without telling me:
Tell me you know Watsonian Dune but don’t know Doylist Dune without telling me. To catch you up:
I was being satirical. And so was Frank Herbert. The Butlerian Jihad and resulting mentats and navigators, groomed from childhood by what are essentially cults and turned into things either barely resembling humans or not resembling humans at all, using endless amounts of drugs like spice and sapho juice along with other ghastly techniques because it was now morally wrong to use computers is a critique of overzealous revolutionary movements that turn into religions.
The Dune universe is a grotesque dystopian future. And the Butlerian Jihad forced humanity to jump out of the frying pan and into the fire. I see the same thing happening today with the current jihad against the machines bubbling up.
a critique of overzealous revolutionary movements that turn into religions
Sure, but which movement are you drawing a parallel to?
The ones that promise to catapult humanity into a golden age of AI if only we turn over control to their weighted random generators, inspiring a cult of followers zealously overturning all social norms of respect and transparency, complain about attempts to protect your art from being stolen and requirements to disclose the use of AI?
Or the ones expressing their concern at the reckless fervour with which the former seek to sacrifice our future, our humanity and our lives to their silicon gods?
I see the same thing happening today with the current jihad against the machines bubbling up.
I haven’t seen any of the sceptics equate the AI used for surveillance or to rob humans of their livelihood with other types of machines. I’m sure there are some that would eliminate all forms of automation, but I don’t get the impression that the bulk of people is opposed to bots in general.
Hell, there is a significant subset of the anti-AI communities I’m in that acknowledges potential applications of LLMs. It’s when humans suffer from their abuse, paying the price for other people’s delusion and greed, that we take issue.
In this instance, the game gets hate because it’s a product of a technology we consider harmful. We don’t want to encourage use of that technology. Is that what you mean by Jihad?
Sure, but which movement are you drawing a parallel to?
Two of the three, one of which you didn’t describe and is raking this indie studio over the coals and trying to destroy them. I’m concerned about the tech bro cult who think they can fire their human employees and have AI make brakes for airplanes without human supervision. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be used at all.
I’m a solo dev working on a boomershooter and there are brutal screams I want from the monsters when they burn that I’m just not going to get from human voice actors off of Fivver, with my no-string budget. I stumbled upon some AI videos with the screams I want and see it as a possible path to fulfilling my vision. But with this raging Butlerian Jihad, looks like I’m going to have to give up on that vision and settle for something much much much less.
There needs to be a level headed middle way of thinking about AI but the world today is constantly being divided into a false dichotomy, a black and white Manichean battle between good and evil. Judicious use of anything, including AI, is possible.
In this instance, the game gets hate because it’s a product of a technology we consider harmful. We don’t want to encourage use of that technology. Is that what you mean by Jihad?
Yes. Because the tech isn’t harmful. Just because there’s a bunch of psychos who kill people with hammers doesn’t mean people who use them to build houses should have their construction company financially destroyed. That’s mindless and cruel and it’s the wrong hill to fight for.
I should be more precise: The thing I consider harmful is the use of GenAI in producing media content.
I get that a small budget is an issue, if you can’t find volunteers helping you out. The problem is that the same method you’d resort to as a substitute for expensive human work is used to put humans out of jobs by people and companies that could afford that expensive work, but don’t want to. It cheapens the end result because it takes a shortcut around the work other people would have put in, and it harms people’s livelihood along the way.
I’ve seen endorsements of GenAI for mockups, a quick way to visualise ideas and see if that’s a direction you want to head in. Once you’ve found something to work with, using it as inspiration for human creative work is fair game. Ultimately, that’s what artists do anyway, whether they want to or not: taking inspiration from the sum of other people’s work they’ve seen and engaged with. The important part is that the result is crafted with human care and effort, and that we appreciate that effort.
That last bit is what Alive Inc. is being dragged for here: They couldn’t figure it out with human work, so they gave up and took the shortcut. And when called out, they didn’t understand that it’s not about the quality of the result alone (though that leaves a lot to be desired as well), but about the value of human creative endeavour.
Is GenAI really the only way to your vision? Sound effects have been able to achieve insane things long before GenAI became so popular. I obviously don’t know what you’re aiming for, but isn’t there some way to work with distortion, layering, pitch shifts or other sound editing methods to produce the kind of scream you want through human effort instead?
If you can’t find a human way to get that effect just the way you want it, that sucks. I get the dissatisfaction of falling short of your expectations. Note it down for a potential future update if the game nets you enough to pay someone for it or catches the eye of someone willing to contribute out of enthusiasm. Until then, as the various comments in this comment section have asserted, people will probably prefer authentic human imperfection over fake excellence.
In conclusion, the “Jihad” comparison only works if you think AI-generated content is equal to human made in value. From that position, people hating on machine work are doing so mindlessly. But that’s a difference in premises we need to be aware of: It’s not that we’re missing the mark, it’s that we’re setting the mark differently.
So if there’s a point to argue, it’s whether people are right to consider GenAI-usage for producing content harmful (and I’ll concede that my previous wording was too general; the issue is ultimately that human work is being bypassed rather than augmented).
Separate comment because separate point:
I find this mindless anti-AI hate ironic when there’s a big heading in the side panel here listing Approved Bots.
First off, there’s a significant difference between anti-GenAI and anti-Bot. The term AI has been thoroughly diluted, to the point that we need to infer from context just which kind of AI is the subject. In this case, it’s GenAI, which isn’t the same as deterministic bot logic “AI”. As for the bots in question:
- L4s seems to have been used for filling the community with content until some two years ago and has been dormant since.
- autotldr used clearly documented algorithms to pick out likely key sentences from news and has also been out of service for two years.
- PipedLinkBot apparently doesn’t even exist any more. I vaguely recall it having some high-profile incident, then never saw it again.
- wikibot was a utility for quoting Wikipedia sections to save people a click… and also hasn’t posted in over two years.
So I’m not sure what your point is. None of these are GenAI, and all of them have long stopped operation. Sentiment shifts over time, and I guess it shifted against them at some point. The section is thus clearly a legacy holdover from a time when the topic wasn’t as present in people’s mind.
If you want to hold the fact that we used to think differently about one thing than we now think about another thing against us, that’s just a non-starter of an argument.
Forums prior to Reddit didn’t allow bots. For a reason.
Clutter, spam. If your threads are paginated and linear, bot spam makes it even harder to follow conversations, particularly if it’s spamming ads, which was rather unpopular at the time.
In a tree-structured format where you can collapse comments and branches you don’t care for, novelty bots are less disruptive.
Additionally, utility bots have been a thing on some forums too. It was never about “computer bad”. We just didn’t want to deal with bad computers. We also didn’t want bad humans.
Slop skeptics, lol.
Hmmm… Yeah, I’m not sure about all of this slop yet 🤔
The room is filling with sewage. I’m not sure that this is a good thing.
Time will tell I suppose 🤔 perhaps if we let the room fill completely with raw sewage and it puts all of the plumbers out of business we’ll know for sure 👆🤓
a Soulslike Metroidvania
Is this the gaming equivalent of increasingly niche music genres?
There’s a billion games like this, it isn’t even niche anymore. That basically describes hollow knight and a bunch of similar games.
It’s actually annoying how many new games insist on being edgelord-level difficulty because of DS. Silksong made me hate its guts after that mountain section. I’ll never buy another one of their games again because of it
Same with ER for that matter, it’s a game I’d enjoy if it didn’t force me to fight bosses like 50 times in a row. And no, I don’t want to get git gud. Too old for that shit now.
I’m still baffled that people found that hard… The mountain and silk song was one of the easiest zones in the game for me lol blew through it in like 20 minutes.
In my experience if a metroidvania game is described as soulslike it means it will have time wasting mechanics like corpse runs, and the spawn points will be placed in awkward locations. Mostly inspired by hollow knight.
The amount of backtracking made me quit the game twice. There will be no 3rd attempt.
It just means they liked hollow Knight
Souls is already kind of like a Metroidvania. Like some areas are much easier with certain things, if not downright required.
One of the things that drew me into Dark Souls to begin with was that it had some of that metroidvania feel. A soulslike metroidvania just sounds kind of redundant as a genre.
I believe the defining feature of the metroidvania genre is that it’s essentially an open world, but certain paths are barred by the need of a specific item/movement mechanic. Like “you need to learn double jump to reach the high platform that lets you access this new area”.
Where as Dark Souls immediately lets you wander into the graveyard or spooky ghost area and get your ass handed to you repeatedly until you wonder, oh maybe this wasn’t the best path!
At the same time, most of the endgame zones are gated behind the lordvessel. And that is gated behind sens and the bells. Four lords behind the ring from sif. That’s gated behind the crest from andre. So there are certainly some walls.
I haven’t played souls games, but perhaps the difference is how central that is to progression? In a metroidvania the world is typically littered by both paths you can’t go through and secrets for you to find, both of which require abilities you’ll be gathering consistently as the main method of progression. As you wander the same paths, the abilities make it easier and faster while letting you find those secrets and now-usable paths to progress further.
I was about to say the same thing. Any Souls-like that actually understands the format is already a Metroidvania. Some think it has something to do with combat, or bonfires, but really it’s the exploration that makes it soul-like.
Honestly, it’s really just a new trendier way to call a game a Metroidvania. I can’t think of any functional differences between the genres. Arguably, RPG mechanics, but many games using the Souls-like description don’t have this, and Sekiro doesn’t, so I think they’re just two terms for the same genre. Metroidvania often has a 2D connotation, and Souls a 3D one, but they’re both used for either.
but really it’s the exploration that makes it soul-like
Maybe ideally but mostly it means “hard combat against bosses with predictable attacks you learn to dodge around”.
Yeah, that’s the bad understanding I’m talking about. It’s a purely surface level view of them, and it’s not what makes them interesting or popular. There are plenty of games with that that suck, so it can’t be the foundation of what Souls-likes are.
It’s also a mechanic that Metroidvanias classically have too, so yeah…
There are plenty of games with that that suck, so it can’t be the foundation of what Souls-likes are.
I’m sure there are also plenty of games with exploration that suck, I don’t think that really makes it a valid point. I can’t speak to what soulslikes are, since I haven’t played the original games, but a game can implement one element well and still fail at being an interesting game, which doesn’t invalidate that element in any way.
Realistically, can’t both combat and exploration be foundational elements of soulslike? I got the impression a big part is the way the combat works, usually involving a lot of commitment into your combat moves, with animations on attacks, dodges, heals, and multiple ways to be punished (and punish enemies), including plain damage, wasting items, wasting stamina.
There’s something at the heart of them that makes them interesting. It isn’t just “exploration”, but a particular style of exploration, which will not fail. It isn’t just boss fights with dodging, because having that alone doesn’t have the heart of a Souls game. The exploration alone could, but yeah, obviously it has to be done properly, not just “exploration”.
Realistically, can’t both combat and exploration be foundational elements of soulslike?
It could. I honestly don’t think it is. Sekiro is also a Souls-like, and the combat is very different. I’m pretty confident you can make a good Souls-like with no combat. The combat, in my opinion, is there to give you a reason to explore. It’s there to be a challenge, where exploring is the key to overcoming it. There will be items and secrets that make the combat easier if you search for it. It’s not required, but you’d need something else to take the place of this.
Chants of Sennaar comes to mind of something I’d consider to capture a lot of the spirit of Souls games without combat. They’re obviously very different games, but I think they share a lot. You can try to brute force your way through, but you’re encouraged to explore and engage with the world, and discover it, which makes the critical path easier. This is the goal for both Souls-likes and CoS.
One thing I’ll say is that Chants of Sennaar is, to my knowledge, usually compared to metroidvanias, part of a subgenre sometimes called “metroidbrainia”, also known as knowledge-gated/rule-discovery puzzle games. Though it’s a bit debatable in terms of how much of it is gated by knowledge, and how much is built to be mechanical progression, but the general idea holds.
I’m also not sure if you can really bruteforce your way through it, but it’s been a while since I’ve played it.
Being good or not isn’t what qualifies something to fall into a particular genre, though
That’s not what I meant. I meant that the core experience will be good if it replicates what the Souls games do, which is why they’re successful. Many “Souls-likes” replicate the combat, and it sucks. Honestly, the DS1 and Demons Souls combat is pretty rough, but they revolutionized gaming, and the boss fights weren’t the unique thing they were doing. Boss fights like them have existed forever.
If you look at the older FromSoftware catalogue, you can see what makes their games special. The older games have incredibly clunky combat, but they still have the core exploration loop. There’s a hand built world with care and thought put into every detail, and the game gives obstacles that get easier if you engage with the world and explore. This is often with items or levels, but it’s sometimes just with information. This is what makes a Souls-likes, and the copycats that fail are missing this (or they just didn’t make an interesting world to explore). Hollow Knight isn’t great because of the combat. The combat is fine, but it’s the interesting world that’s begging for you to engage with it that makes it compelling. That’s the core of Souls-likes.
I mean, even you seem to be struggling to describe what makes a game a like… Which is exploration? Which could apply to a dozen other completely unrelated genres.
Dilution of buzzwords like roguelike and roguelite. I’m waiting for soulslite to pop up soon.
Although metroidvania I somehow have no qualms with, since pretty much any that I’ve seen is pretty faithful.
Roguelike = like Rogue, no meta progression
Roguelite = usually just means like Rogue with meta progression
I had to go look these up to know there was a difference and I like these games.
Roguelike is more complex, there’s no governing body to decide on a proper definition, but I think the consensus that was reached long ago includes elements like turn-based, grid-based, non-modal, playable in an ASCII terminal. I think the last one is outdated, but the rest are significant components of what makes roguelikes… roguelikes.
Modality in games is a particularly interesting aspect when you start looking at various other games, and something that matches up with things I dislike in games. One fun example is movement in FPS games, which can be built either on universal mechanics or a predefined moveset - some games will allow you to perform a vault move when next to a low obstacle, other games might let you crouch, jump, and crouch while jumping to get over low obstacles.
My new game is a roguevania, souls like, gothic horror version of Metroid. /s
painterly
Lovely word, cant believe ive never seen it before
I see it used mostly for manually painted 3D scenes - where the artist has textured the objects with brush strokes, or a procedural shader setup that makes it look like they’ve been painted.
Random example from the internet:
You’re one of today’s lucky 10,000
Pear shaped?
Basically means “not good”, but the etymology expands on it more.